When I read a new report on app store trends for 2013 recently, my most irritating fear was confirmed: The freemium app business model has not only won the app sales model, it has handily crushed the paid app model -- squeezed it down into a tiny sliver of relative revenue. The results are so tilted that even more new apps will apparently be written entirely with the freemium model in mind.

Since the dawn of personal computing, managing storage has been a persistent challenge. Certainly the pressure has eased up on the desktop with the proliferation of 1 TB hard drives, but for laptops and lightweight notebooks, the struggle continues. One of the problems with grappling with all the data on a hard drive is transparency. Eyeballing thousands of file names in the Finder is both tiresome and inefficient.

It's damn near 2014, and what's the most baffling computing experience we have? The Apple TV television experience. It's so disappointing. We get new so-called TV channels -- or little Applets -- that give us a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the content available from a particular broadcast network, but it's also locked down so we have to be a cable television subscriber to view it.

Apple has taken a step toward a more interactive shopping experience, activating iOS 7's iBeacon technology at its 254 U.S. retail outlets. It was to start providing information about in-store products and services directly to customers' iPhones, based on their location within the store, on Friday. The iBeacon technology allows Apple to target iPhones within a centimeter.

Surf over to the Mac App Store, and you'll find plenty of utilities for keeping your Apple personal computer in tip-top shape. There are tools for freeing up RAM and cleaning files from disks and thoroughly uninstalling apps. Have you ever wished, however, that you had a an app to perform all those tasks under the same hood? IObit is doing that with MacBooster.

Workers at Amazon in Germany are striking yet again in an effort to coax the company into better pay and conditions. Hundreds of workers at two Amazon centers, one in Bad Hersfeld and one in Leipzig, walked out on Monday. At the heart of the strikes -- there have been a handful of short strikes by Amazon workers in Germany this year -- is Amazon's classification of itself as a logistics company.

NaturalMotion first wowed Apple fans at last year's September Apple event with a tantalizing demo of a new game, Clumsy Ninja, which was teased to hit iOS sometime during the 2012 holiday season. Santa came and went, and no little kids played Clumsy Ninja. And then boom, Apple reveals Clumsy Ninja as an Editor's Choice app in the iTunes App Store with, get this, a video trailer.

Blaring bargain news over PA systems may become a thing of the past if a pilot project launched Thursday by Macy's and Shopkick catches on with the brick-and-mortar set. The companies are conducting the experiments in Macy's San Francisco and New York City stores. The pilot feeds deal and discount information to shoppers as they roam through a store.

Logitech on Wednesday introduced its new PowerShell Controller + Battery, a device that's designed to turn users' iPhones into gaming consoles. Compatible with iPhone 5, iPhone 5s and fifth-generation iPod touch devices running iOS 7, the PowerShell offers analog off-screen controls along with a battery pack for $99.99. It is now available.

Oceanhorn is a delightfully odd adventure game for iOS, at once fresh and yet heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda, a classic title from the days when Nintendo ruled video gaming. Beyond evoking fond memories of exploring a wide open land while trying to save a princess, Oceanhorn is interesting because it's on iOS. Success? Definitely. It's a fun diversion.

Apple angered millions of iPhone users -- and baffled millions more -- when it ditched the generally functional built-in Google-based Maps app in favor of its own. That was last year, when it introduced iOS 6. Howls of anger rocketed across the Web, and fanboys of other platforms -- including some Apple enthusiasts -- started tracking Apple Maps fails.

Mail clients have lost their luster in recent times. Between social media fulfilling the messaging needs of many people and webmail's growing popularity, desktop email apps are beginning to look passť. Still, email clients have their adherents. I count myself among them. I like the idea of having all my email on my computer, not in someone's cloud where someone I don't know might peruse it.

Duck Dynasty is an American reality television series on A&E featuring a band of redneck family men who sport ratty beards. They became wealthy by making the popular duck call, Duck Commander, and the reality show itself? It's a wild phenomenon -- the fourth season premiere snagged a whopping 11.8 million viewers. When I saw that the show had a No. 1 paid app game, I had to take a closer look.

A flaw found in a "staggering number" of apps for the iPhone and iPad could be exploited to send malicious information to the gadgets, researchers at Skycure reported Tuesday. The vulnerability allows enterprising hackers to redirect an app's communication with its appointed server to one operated by nefarious parties. The flaw could affect other mobile platforms too.

Real updates to Apple's iWork suite of apps -- Pages, Numbers and Keynote -- have been a long time coming, so when Apple updated the suite with a free upgrade that plays well with iOS 7 and with Web browsers, plenty of users jumped into the new version without looking. Unfortunately, a good many found they had leapt into a shallow pool full of sharp rocks.

Well we've had a few weeks of fun here in the Linux blogosphere dissecting Linux poll results, but last week brought those inwardly focused musings to an abrupt end. The cause? Yet another news flash from the outside world. The conversation was in full swing down at the blogosphere's Punchy Penguin when a turtleneck-clad stranger burst through the saloon's swinging doors.

The Mac came first, but the iPhone and iPad are what rocketed Apple to the top of the consumer technology mountain. The thing is, while the iPhone is a great phone, the head-scratching success of Apple's mobile device sales is only partially due to the hardware and OS itself. Apple's success is all about how well Apple creates, connects and distributes its entire hardware and software ecosystem.

Apple threw down the gauntlet to the PC industry and aimed some veiled barbs at rival Microsoft at a Tuesday launch event to refresh its software and hardware lines. Apple announced new editions of its iWork and iLife suites, which will come free with any new iPad, iPhone or Mac. Further, all of its customers can upgrade to OS X Mavericks, the latest version of OS X, for free.

Way back in 1993, a little exploratory puzzle mystery game called Myst was released for the Mac. It took off to become one of the best-selling -- and moodiest -- games ever, expanding to a variety of other platforms. The creators followed up with Riven, and now, 20 years after Myst, they are using Kickstarter to launch a new indie-developed game, Obduction.

In a flurry of presentations at its special media event on Tuesday, Apple introduced new iPads, MacBook Pros, the Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks -- available immediately, and free -- as well new generations of iWork and iLife app suites. The biggest buzz comes from Apple's brand new iPad, the iPad Air, which is 20 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than the fourth-generation iPad that it replaces.

How many times a day do we open and save files on our Macs? The operations are so common, we don't think twice about doing them. Fortunately, the folks at St. Clair Software have cooked up an app to improve them. Default Folder X is available from the company's website for $34.95, although you can try it free for 30 days. What DFX does is add features to Save and Open dialog boxes.

Apple will likely debut a new iPad and possibly a new iPad mini at its Tuesday event in San Francisco. There is speculation about a new CPU, a keyboard case, better cameras, a splash of color, and the likelihood the new iPad will come preloaded with the buggy iOS 7. If the enterprise is looking for a little more business-friendliness from Apple, it may not find much gratification this time around.

Apple's iMessage instant messenger service, which has made headlines for being uncrackable by law enforcement, may not be so secure after all. An internal DEA document published in April stated that it was impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices. Not so, said Quarkslab researcher Cyril Cattiaux, who identified weaknesses in its end-to-end encryption.

Apple appears to have been handed a potent weapon it can use as it battles in courtrooms around the world to assert its patent rights. Specifically, in a recent re-examination of a key multitouch patent held by Apple, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last month upheld all 20 claims included in the patent, according to a filing spotted on Thursday.

Supercell has closed on a round of funding totaling $1.53 billion. SoftBank and GungHo Online Entertainment, which made the joint investment, will hold 51 percent of Supercell's outstanding voting stock. Supercell creates games for mobile and tablet platforms on the free-to-play business model. Games are free, but in-game purchases enhance the gameplay and help players advance through levels.

For a company that prides itself on creating intuitive applications, Apple stumbled when it created iCloud. As a Dropbox user, I found little in iCloud that I needed. In fact, finding iCloud on a Mac can be adventurous, although it has a nasty habit of showing up as a default save location when I want to save a file from an app to my hard drive. Cloud Mate aims to take some of the mystery out of iCloud. It gathers up everything in your iCloud and displays it in a single Finder-like window.

One of the amazing things about our new connected world of software development and easy access to consumers is how old-school games can find new life with entirely new audiences through iOS and OS X. Case in point? The Dragon's Lair 30th Anniversary app for iOS. Dragon's Lair is a really old arcade game. Seriously old, as in it was a laserdisc video game. I barely remember laserdiscs.

Despite the nonperfect and confusing name, Shadow Puppet is the best new app I've seen in weeks. Basically, Shadow Puppet lets you select photos from your iPhone or iPad and then record audio as you talk over them in a slideshow that Shadow Puppet turns into a shareable video. Along the way, you can tap to highlight certain areas of a photo and, better still, you can zoom in and move the photo around.

Apple let a silly game demonstration take center stage at WWDC in June, and it released a new framework with instructions on how developers could build physical game controllers. The two together led me to believe that an Apple sneak attack on living room gaming was imminent. Since then, two more elements have risen to the surface, and now I think the sneak attack is well under way.

Apple reportedly has pledged to fix a bug in iOS 7 that has been plaguing some users. This will be the second fix since the iOS 7 was released Sept. 18. The first was issued Sept. 20 to resolve a problem with the iPhone 5s fingerprint scanner. At least 16 iOS 7 problems have surfaced so far, including a bug that lets anyone bypass the iPhone's lockscreen.